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Elle

It may sound paradoxical to say it, but this black comedy has a, well, a light touch.

It is light and ludic too, appropriately enough you might think, since Michèle (Isabelle Huppert), the victim of a brutal rape, runs a company that makes computer games. This is film as play: there are sex games, death games, Hitchcockian games involving violence and betrayal and jeopardy. And you cannot really call it a disturbing affair, since the film refuses to take transgression, or even evil, seriously.

At the end the men go to pot – to the grave or to the bottle – and the women prosper, so it is a feminist film, sort of.